ballads of the district--on all he turned an
equally curious eye, and with such vivid impressions that they
remained in his memory after the lapse of half a lifetime.

[Footnote 95: "I, too," Goethe wrote in _Dichtung und Wahrheit_, "had
trodden the path of knowledge, and had early been led to see the
vanity of it."]

In Goethe the instinct for self-mastery was as remarkable as his
instinct for knowledge. As the result of his illness in Frankfort, his
organs of sense were in a state of morbid susceptibility which "put
him out of harmony with himself, with objects around him, and even
with the elements." It throws a curious light on the nature of the man
that amid all the preoccupations of his mind and heart in Strassburg
he could deliberately turn his thoughts to the cure of his jarred
nerves. Loud sounds disturbed him, and to deaden the sensitiveness of
his ears he attended the evening tatoo; to cure himself of a tendency
to giddiness he practised climbing the cathedral; partly to rid
himself of a repugnance to repulsive sights he attended clinical
lectures; and by a similar course of discipline he so completely
delivered himself from "night fears" that he afterwards found it
difficult to realise them even in imagination.

In his old age Goethe said of himself: "I have that in me which, if I
allowed it to go unchecked, would ruin both myself and those about
me." Was it, as Goethe would have us believe, by sheer purposive will
that he kept this dangerous element in him under check and saved
himself at critical moments from disaster? When we regard his life as
a whole, the actual facts hardly justify such a conclusion. Nature had
given him two safeguards which, without any effort of will on his own
part, assured him deliverance where the risk of wreckage was
greatest--a consuming desire to _know_ which grew with every year of
his life, and a versatility of temperament which necessitated
ever-renewed sensations equally of the mind and heart. Of the working
of these two elements in him we have already had illustration; they
will receive further illustration as we proceed.

It would be within the truth to say that the period of Goethe's
sojourn in Strassburg was the most memorable epoch of his life. During
the eighteen months he spent there he received an intellectual
stimulus from which we may date his dedication to the unique career
before him, in which self-culture, the passion for knowledge, and the
impulse to pro